Linux

Mint is always my recommendation for a Linux beginner. It's the most "it just works" distro I've ever messed with, and has plenty of documentation for anything you'd need.

As for advice: I know you want to avoid the CLI, but try to poke around in there and learn it some. Once you get used to it, you can accomplish a lot of things even faster than through GUI applications.

I love openSUSE and think it's one of the few distros that has a pretty good implementation for every DE/WM. GNOME, KDE, Xfce, lxqt, enlightenment, mate, sway, etc... are all a solid experience on openSUSE.

That said, I have never found a distro with a good Cinnamon experience other than Linux Mint. Probably in part due to cinnamon being developed by mint, but regardless, if you want to use cinnamon, mint is your best option.

If I had to pick a recommendation from those 3 for a novice Linux install I'd probably pick mint.

I've used Fedora, and I think it is not an easy distro for beginners, especially if you don't know your way around the terminal. My experience with OpenSUSE was so-so, but I have a negative image for it not being vanilla enough. Linux Mint would be the right choice for you.

But given your political inclination, I'm assuming that you probably also might have strong feelings for Stallman's philosophy of hardcore GPL adherance and disdain towards proprietary copyright ones and maybe even permissive copyleft licenses. None of the above distros are for GNU-purists, if you are interested in going all libre. But that path isn't easy, as most drivers out there are proprietary.

One thing you need to understand - most of us don't play games a lot, but rather into open source contributions. Personally, I like NixOS, but if I had the privilege to, I'd jump to Guix.

I pickup Fedora because I like the name... completely arbritary.

I distro hop between several distributions and I keep coming back to linux mint. I would say it’s the best distro to use if you want to avoid the CLI as much as possible. It has a large amount of users so you’ll find no shortage of support, can’t recommend it enough.

I did debian with cinnamon and ran into some issues

This might be important; perhaps consider telling us about the issues you ran into.

I am an absolute beginner to linux

Honestly, you should be fine regardless. But it's undeniable that -due to Linux Mint's popularity amongst new users- you'll likely have an easier time finding solutions to problems you might encounter.

and i’m a g*mer (laugh it up)

Once again, either one of these should be able to suit your needs. You might have to relearn how you access your games, but that's true regardless of whichever distro you end up choosing.

My typical recommendation for anyone new to Linux looking to get their feet wet would be Linux Mint. As long as you keep the system updated, it should be a decent choice for gaming.

The following is not to discourage you, but to help keep expectations in check. Gaming on Linux is not perfect. It's not comparable to gaming on Windows. A LOT of games (with the assistance of Steam's Proton) "just work," but things are not to a point where that's ever a guarantee. I would recommend looking up your staple games on to review Linux compatibility, if the games run or need additional run options.

I say all this as someone who runs exclusively Linux, and is a gamer and occasionally streams. It's perfectly doable, but expect to have to get your hands dirty at some point in the venture. And don't be afraid to ask questions!

Linux Mint Debian Edition. Second choice would be Fedora.

I would go with Mint because it has the largest selection of apps. Of course you can run any Linux program on any Linux distro, but with Mint you are able to just install almost anything without difficulty from a package manager like synaptic, or the built-in Mint Software Manager. That includes game launchers like Steam and Proton. This is, in my opinion, what makes Mint OS truly the most beginner friendly Linux distro.

Fedora is good too, but you need to grant it access to other sources of apps before you see the wider selection of apps outside of the more limited, strictly FLOSS apps that are available by default on Fedora. And these extra steps of finding trustworthy sources and installing them makes Fedora a bit harder to use, at least for beginners.

I have to recommend Linux Mint. I've been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) for over seven years now as my only operating system (and no dual booting) without any major issues or any desire to "distro hop." Cinnamon has also gotten a lot more stable during that time too. I have almost no crashes anymore.

Give nobara a try. It's fedora with focus on gaming. Mint is always a good option. Personally I use endeavour os, pretty straight forward to install but maybe a bit too barebones if you don't know what you need yet.